Mary Baker Eddy speaks of Dr. Benjamin Rush as “the famous Philadelphia teacher of medical practice” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 162). Benjamin Rush was most certainly famous. He was the best-known American medical doctor of his time, at home and abroad.
A physician, writer, professor, and scientist, Dr. Rush lived during the tumultuous years of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, future Presidents of the United States, were fellow patriots and longtime friends of Benjamin Rush. He was with the two men at the Second Continental Congress in 1776. He took his seat in Congress on July 22 and signed the Declaration of Independence less than two weeks later. At thirty years old, Rush was the second youngest signer.
Religion was woven into the young man’s upbringing. His thoughts about Christianity supported his political view that the American colonies should be a republic, not a monarchy. Christianity would help the nation thrive, he felt, because a republic is based on the biblical truths that all people are created equal and must love others as themselves. In one of his many essays, “Of the mode of education proper in a republic,” Dr. Rush wrote, “A Christian cannot fail of being useful to the republic, for his religion teacheth him, that no man ‘liveth to himself.’ ”
Mary Baker Eddy had in common with Benjamin Rush the honest desire to benefit humanity.
This tireless thinker and pioneering reformer came at his work with the desire to build a better society. Benjamin Rush wrote and published extensively, advocating free public schools, the abolition of slavery, temperance reform, improved education for women, humane treatment of the mentally ill, better sanitation in cities, conservation of natural resources, and a more enlightened penal system. Thanks to Dr. Rush’s outspoken opposition to capital punishment, the Pennsylvania legislature abolished the death penalty for all crimes other than first-degree murder.
Benjamin Rush was such a popular and inspirational lecturer that his fame drew thousands of medical students to Philadelphia. He made his mark as a professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia—where he wrote the first American textbook on chemistry—and later as a lecturer in the theory and practice of medicine at the newly established University of Pennsylvania.
Rush was an eager student himself. He completed his college studies at Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) in 1760 at age 14. Three years later he translated Aphorisms by Hippocrates, the early Greek physician. Mary Baker Eddy quotes a statement from Dr. Rush in Science and Health in which he mentions Hippocrates (see next page).
When Dr. Rush took up his medical practice in Philadelphia in 1769, he gave free treatment to the poor if they could not pay. His large humanity and courage during the yellow fever epidemics that hit the city made an impression on the public. When others were fleeing Philadelphia, he stayed to help the sick.
Mrs. Eddy was clearly apart from the medical practitioners like Dr. Rush who preceded her, or those who followed her. She founded a system of purely metaphysical healing that addresses the mentality of the patient, instead of doctoring matter. Mrs. Eddy counters material medical practices in passages from Science and Health such as, “Anodynes, counter-irritants, and depletion never reduce inflammation scientifically, but the truth of being, whispered into the ear of mortal mind, will bring relief” (p. 374).
In Christian Science Mrs. Eddy sets forth the revolutionary method of healing practiced by Christ Jesus, which lifts human thought above material causes and cures to divine Mind, God, for relief from sin and sickness. In her practice with severe cases of both acute and chronic disease, she observed that patients were healed by humble prayer that fosters an understanding of spiritual truths, such as that God is Spirit and true substance, and that the real man of God’s creating is spiritual, not material. In her words, “The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love” (Science and Health, p. 1).
Dr. Benjamin Rush appears in Science and Health along with quotes from five other respected medical practitioners. Beginning with Rush, Mrs. Eddy writes: “With due respect for the faculty, I kindly quote from Dr. Benjamin Rush, the famous Philadelphia teacher of medical practice. He declared that ‘it is impossible to calculate the mischief which Hippocrates has done, by first marking Nature with his name, and afterward letting her loose upon sick people’ ” (Science and Health, pp. 162–163).
Mrs. Eddy had in common with Benjamin Rush the honest desire to benefit humanity. She no doubt thought of him as part of the “cultured class of medical practitioners” whom she considered to be “grand men and women” (Science and Health, p. 164), and with whom she may have felt a certain kinship in her deep desire to bring healing to the human race. But she never lost her conviction regarding the error of material systems of healing, saying, “But all human systems based on material premises are minus the unction of divine Science.” And she adds, “Much yet remains to be said and done before all mankind is saved and all the mental microbes of sin and all diseased thought-germs are exterminated” (Science and Health, p. 164). Her response to the need was to give humanity a spiritual system of healing through omnipotent Mind, God, who, as the Bible declares, “healeth all thy diseases” (Psalms 103:3).
JSH-Online.com subscribers can listen to all the podcasts in this series, “Mary Baker Eddy Mentioned Them.” Visit journal.christianscience.com/audio/mbe-mentioned-them.
